I have had around a dozen smart bulbs/switches/plugs from three companies for 5-10 years now. Globe Suite, Meross, and ‘C by GE’ (General Electric). All three are dependent on their respective cloud services, and are integrated with Google Home. (I know, I know… It’s time to dump this crap, it’s why I’m here) Globe Suite has been great tbh, but ‘C by GE’ is absolute trash, and one of the two Meross devices have now died, prompting a long awaited change.
My big sticking point is knowing where to start with hardware. I don’t know much about the different communication protocols/methods or what to choose (zigbee? Z-wave? Do I need some sort of Hub? Can/should I just use a wifi connection like the current setup? 🤷), and I don’t really know where to look to purchase smart devices that aren’t cloud dependent. (buying from Canada)
Funds are tight so this’ll be an over time project. For now I’m looking to replace three switches. One single pole. One 3-way. Ane one dimmer. Neutral wires are available at all three locations.
Later I’ll be looking to replace 3 smart plugs. Adding current/power monitoring would be neat, but definitely not a priority as I have an Iotawatt at the pannel. After that 4 dimmable white light smart bulbs. Finally there’s an RGBW LED controller that’ll need replacing. The plugs, bulbs, and leds are all Globe Suite; I’m not in a major hurry to replace them as they’ve given me next to no trouble compared to the other two companies garbage.
Where do I start? Where do you guys buy hardware, and what manufacturers?
What should I be looking for in hardware I can integrate with HA and essentially firewall off from the internet?
Finally, how about things like sensors? (weather, motion, moisture, sound)
The next week or so I’ll fire up an HA container just to poke around a bit more. That part I’m pretty confident in, it’s just figuring out some hardware to go with it. Thanks for any advice :)
For the Home Assistant install, I would suggest a mini-PC. I run mine on an old Intel NUC. The mini-PC will give you more flexibility as you add and expand automation. I had read of Raspberry Pis bogging down under load (this was pre version 4 and 5). But even the NUC bogs down with local voice assistant use. I’m thinking of building my own, local LLM computer to offload voice. Eventually.
As far as other hardware, I’d go with the ZBT-1 (formally called SkyConnect) for Thread support, which is the new kid on the protocol block and we’re starting to see a good set of devices.
After that you’ll have to make a choice between Zigbee and Z-Wave, and buy a dongle for one of them to attach to HA to get the functionality. Both work solidly. Z-Wave devices tend to be more expensive because of the rigorous testing Z-Wave certification requires. Zigbee is cheaper, but it works on the 2.4Ghz spectrum, same as Wifi. It can lead to some interference if you still have a lot of old Wifi devices. You’ll have to look and see what kind of devices you want to run, what they cost, and decide from there. Personally, I went Z-Wave and most of my light switches are Z-Wave. it’s been solid but pricey. Hoping to see more Matter/Thread switches soon.
You’ll see a lot of Matter talk. Matter comes in two flavors, Matter/Wifi and Matter/Thread. Matter is a framework for devices to talk to automation hubs to tell them what functionality/sensors are available, Wifi/Thread is the protocol it communicates to the hub and other devices. I look for Thread devices since it is more like Zigbee/Z-Wave (Thread from what I understand is based on Zigbee). It builds an internal mesh network and keeps everything local, and it can’t communicate over the internet by itself.
If you don’t mind a bit of tinkering, I can recommend the Home Assistant Voice Preview devices. It is a voice device that talks to HA to be the voice front end. It is not nearly as polished as Google Voice or Alexa, but since I regulated Google Voice to basically be a voice front end to HA, it has been a decent replacement.